muscleman

I wound encourage you to do the mental exercise to not only see the prices down 50% but also when you open WSJ, you see the media bombarding you for the end of the world coming. John Templeton said the time to sell is before the crash, not after the crash because price is already down. The data set is getting more bearish each day, but I still do not see all stars aligning yet, so I do not have a compelling case at the moment. I am holding all cash at the moment instead of opening short positions. Attached is an interesting comparison with 2007. I am not saying that this time it will follow just like that.

I don't think MSFT is going to 27. But if it goes from 290 to 100, is your gut strong enough to hold it through? You sure you won't puke it all out? If you are such a super long term holder, then it is time to start practicing mental exercises now, and see if you are really willing to hold it through. If yes then hold. If not, well you know what to do.

Don't forget what happened to Cisco in 2000. Even MCD and Disney had dramatic 70% drops when the nifty-fifty theme ended. They are quality stocks for sure. That doesn't mean they are immune. Everyday, the evidence is piling up. We just had over 400 Nasdaq stocks making new 52 week lows last Friday, and that was more than March 2020 during covid crash. Liquidity is drying up too.

Update: We still don't have all stars aligning yet, but more and more data set points to a major top right here. I have no stocks at the moment and just applied to open the futures trading permission as I plan to start a small trial index short position.

I am a little puzzled when I log onto IBKR website and saw that they have a program to invest my cash into IBKR notes that yields 0.5% for 60 day duration. I am a little confused here. If I buy the notes using cash in my account, do I still have the cash to buy stocks when I want to? I know some other brokers like Fidelity has the automatic redemption ability, so if I want to buy a stock, they will automatically withdraw from the money market fund and use that to buy stocks.

Thank you! Wow I thought big banks tend to be much more expensive than smaller banks. But in your case it isn't bad at all. I almost forgot that you already married again. Hope you and your family are happy in your new house and enjoy it!

May I ask which lender you are using to get this kind of cash out refi loans? As I understand, you are no longer on a salaried job. I am surprised that you can still get loans, and at such low cost.

I just realized.... Is he talking about a 5 year mortgage, or a 30 year mortgage with the first 5 years being fixed rate? If it is a 5 year mortgage, then the monthly payments could be pretty insane right?

no one knows the future, but right now it looks like rates will be raising by a full 100 bp and tops out mid next year.

I only have cash and a small amount of put options right now. I plan to add more puts in the coming weeks but don't plan to have a crazy exposure as puts are already leverage bets. I don't think this is a 2008 crash, but more likely a dot com crash. After the crash, valuation will start to matter again.

In a secular bull market from 2009 to now, you would want to BTFD. Every time when investor sentiment is bad, it is a great time to buy. That will not work in a secular bear market. I think we are going to have the inflection point soon, especially if covid situation quickly improves from now.

Yes the supply chain disruption will be fixed soon. But don't forget Fed's printing 120 bn per month and that's been going on for a long time. The cash is circulating around the economy. Unless they have plans to recycle all that cash back, then inflation is inevitable. I don't see why the fed would recycle the cash.

#2 is not an option anymore since last year. I think this whole Evergrande saga was engineered by the current administration because it published a "3 red line rule" last year, and under that rule, it ordered all banks to stop lending to Evergrande last year. Whenever a heavily indebted company suddenly is unable to rollover its debt, it will inevitably fail.

That would only work if the husband's own salary is able to support the whole family, which is not realistic in most cases today when the property prices are sky high and a single earners salary is not able to support the mortgage. Remember: The US houses are trading at 4-5x median annual household income and most households are single earners. The Chinese condos are trading at 20-25x median annual household income.

I've been closely following the Evergrand debacle since last year. I don't think it is a Lehman moment. Yes it will likely announce a restructuring soon, but the big difference is that the Chinese government is already starting to help with the restructure, unlikely Lehman which the Fed did not bail out and that caused a massive financial crisis.

This is how socialism drives into people's heart and activates their worst part of characters. People want to get handouts. Not money after hard work.

What you described can be tracked by breadth indicators. Before the dot com bubble bursted and the 2008 sub prime top started, market breadth started to head south for months while the index kept going up. That is part of the reason that I am projecting a TOP this year as well. It is still unclear if the top is now or later this year but I think playing individual stocks between now and later this year is difficult because the breadth is terrible, and the chances to capture the stocks running up is lower. Just because a stock started to decline doesn't mean it is going to bounce back. Look at EDU, Enron etc. They start to decline for months before the major hit news came out to kill them.

Thank you for looking into the report. I appreciate people like you who seriously look into the data. The report doesn't have detailed weekly breakdowns of the hospitalization numbers for unvaxed people. So we can only do some back of the napkin estimates. Assuming delta variant and the original variant's severe case % for unvaxed people is similar, then if we take that 20k total hospitalizations in the report, and divide that by the 332k total cases, we get about 6.2% hospitalizations. This is much lower than the 12.1% hospitalization of the vaxed group on page 21. Of course, there is a break down of hospitalization due to covid and not due to covid, for those 12.1% vaxed cases, so the actual % should be lower, but i assume the same happens for unvaxed group. I've seen online stories about this. Hospitals are eager to find covid positive cases and put them in the covid division. Even if it is just 1 day, they charge 15k from the insurance company. Regarding the table you posted above, I would argue that there is a much more testing effort going on for the unvaxed group, so there could be lots of vaxed and positive cases not found. A lot of employers are pushing for the policy to either get vaxed or get tested weekly. This means vaxed people, if they have a mild sympthom, very likely goes uncovered. The reason I have strong doubts about this table is because with the recent Delta breakout, it is already clear that vaccination does not provide protection against infection. So I've been focused on hospitalization rate.

Thank you for the explanation. I think it starts to make sense to me now and if the data is correct, then the ADE risk doesn't seem to exist. I still find it strange that there is not a single severe case for 12 years and younger, as Delta is impacting children more than prior variants. A family in our community just got the whole family of five infected, and their oldest son of 10 years old passed away last week, and their second oldest son of 8 years old is in the ICU. If we have cases like this nearby, I find it hard to believe that Israel as a whole country, doesn't have a single severe case in that period.

The table that I posted above shows the author is citing misleading vaccination rates to draw his conclusions. (switching the concept of 78% vax rate for 12+ yrs old to 78% vax rate of the entire population). The table here is pretty solid, if we can verify that the data is correct. I can't understand the Israel government website's language so I can't verify it. If anyone can, please let me know.

Thank you for the discussion. I appreciate real discussions like this with data and links, not blank assertions that vaccine works, or vaccine doesn't work. When I open the "Israeli government data dashboard" link inside your link, it is not English. I can't understand anything there. In the link you mentioned, it did say "60% of hospitalized are vaccinated", so at least that means the self media I found are not making up the numbers. I disagree with the calculation for the cases per 100k people below. According to Google, Israel's vax rate is 59% of the entire population, not 78.7%. The article itself mentioned the following "High vaccination rates in the country (nearly 80% of all residents >12yr)". So it is basically misleading people by using the wrong vaccination rate to play the numbers game. The table below says "All ages", but it is using the vax rate > 12 years old. If they use the 59% vaccination rate, the conclusion is totally different.

Thank you for the data point. Right now 90% of new cases are Delta. The numbers you posted here is drastically different from Dallas County or Israel, and more in line with Ontario Canada's numbers. I don't know what's going on here.

This reminds me of citibank's CEO in 2007. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." I think this is the dot com bubble top 2.0. TSLA, AMZN and related stocks have burned a lot of short sellers over the years. I think it will work this time.

The whole market is doing a top building right now. Liquidity is being drained from small caps each day. Without any catalyst, I expect FNMAS to drift down along the rest of the small cap stocks.

The conversation could be more constructive when you post details like this. I've seen this data from the CDC, which is correct, but completely misleading. It combines all the cases since the vaccine becomes available, which has nothing to do with whether the vaccine has ADE or not. The whole point of ADE risk is that the vaccine works extremely well against the original virus but makes it worse during Delta.